"Butoh America"
Akira Kasai
With Sara Baird, Alissa Cardone, Erin Dudley, Celeste Hastings, and Stephanie Lanckton
Japan Society, New York
October 25, 2007
by Tom Phillips
copyright 2007 by Tom Phillips
“What is butoh?” Yoko Shioya, the director of Japan Society’s performing arts program, asked us all to consider that question during her 3-week Butoh Parade, part of the society’s centennial festivities. To give us something new to discuss, she commissioned a piece by Japanese butoh master Akira Kasai, who chose to create it with American dancers, saying he hoped to introduce a new butoh to New York that could not have been created in Japan or Europe. “Butoh America” is a showcase for five powerful young American women, and one androgynous Japanese corpse. Don’t worry, he comes to life.
The five women are each striking in their own way, but they all move with strength and purpose. In half-a-dozen segments of dance, they seem to be muscling their way through a difficult environment, frequently changing costumes, colors, and styles of movement, and occasionally spouting bursts of language. “What’s happening?” “I’m not really sure!” goes one repeated Q & A.
It could be the contemporary American marketplace, dominated by purposeful, buff up-and-comers, each desperately battling for her place in the rat race. Or it could take place entirely in the spiritual realm. Butoh doesn’t tell. But halfway through, the dance is transformed as a white backdrop rolls up, to reveal an object of mystery and veneration: a white bathtub on a pedestal. Upon investigation it proves to hold a shroud, which the women haul out and unroll on the floor, dumping out a body in a loincloth, powdered dead white.
The corpse (Kasai himself) is left alone to be born again, to the sound of a sweet religious chant undercut by a drum machine. He rises to half-point, explores the air with trembling fingers, with a look that oscillates between shock and delight. The women return and kneel around him, but with hands transformed into menacing claws. Facing rear, they all perform a homage to the bath. Then the women fall on the old man and eat him alive with lusty chomping sounds, before dumping him back into the tub, casually wiping their mouths with their forearms. The audience laughs heartily, and the women go on to rule the stage in an energetic finale.
As one of the laughers, I must try to explain. It wasn’t exactly a belly laugh, more a chuckle of release from the tyranny of ordinary thinking. Because butoh does not explain or judge, the women’s bestial action does not change one’s basic perception or opinion of them, it just reveals them more fully. It is not about the clash or the co-existence of good and evil, life and death, but about their essential identity. Seeing beautiful young women as cannibal harpies is like seeing a dead man dance – both aspects are in one flesh.
So what is butoh? Some have compared it to the Stanislavsky acting method, which involves pouring the self into a character. But I think butoh is simpler – a deep, instinctive exploration of the self, refined but not altered by the discipline of the dance. In “Butoh America” the dancers are each distinct, even when they move through similar choreographic patterns. Three solos stood out: a slow, yearning stretch upward from the floor by the dreamy Sara Baird, to a classical guitar; a searching quest by the intense Alissa Cardone to a Chopinesque piano, and a whirling episode of agitation by Celeste Hastings, to a lute being abused by a fork, a plastic bag and other non-musical objects. One had the feeling of being invited to join a voyage of self-discovery by each of these dancers, and also by the versatile guitarist, Anders Nilsson, who provided the live portions of the music.
Choreographer-director Kasai set out to create a distinctive American butoh, and probably succeeded as much as he could in a single work. The evening began with a loud disco prelude, and then a wild ride on a shuddering film loop of what looked like an airport corridor. This was followed by a 21st-century discovery of America – beautiful and brutal, carefree and tragic. In his program note, Kasai writes “for me, America symbolizes the setting of the sun of history, a golden twilight in the journey of humanity.” So maybe “Butoh America” means the rising sun illuminating its opposite, the vanquished at the funeral of the victor, life and death in one.
copyright 2007 by Tom Phillips
